Gastric bypass in a pill

In the future, a pill could guarantee all the benefits of bariatric surgery, without the need to undergo an invasive and debilitating procedure such as gastric bypass. The news comes from the congress of the European Society of Obesity Eco 2025, where researchers from the American biotech Syntis Bio presented the preliminary data of the trial of Synt-101, a new molecule developed to move the absorption of nutrients towards the lower tract of the intestine, thus mimicking the metabolic and weight-loss effects of surgery.

The experimental molecule

The drug in question is designed to act as a barrier, creating a temporary coating of polydopamine, a synthetic polymer derived from dopamine, in the duodenum - the initial part of the intestine, with excellent adhesive and biocompatibility properties. In this way, its creators hope to be able to mimic the effects of gastric bypass, a procedure that modifies the path of food by excluding the upper parts of the intestine, reducing the absorption of nutrients and promoting weight loss through metabolic changes that help reduce hunger and fight diabetes.

The advantages

Compared to new drugs against obesity (GLP-1 receptor agonists), bariatric surgery has advantages and disadvantages. The problems, obviously, are related to the invasiveness of the surgical procedure - not reversible - and to the fact that the success rate in people with obesity is not as high as one would expect, because if you are unable to successfully change your lifestyle it is easy to go back to eating incorrectly and excessively, and in that case you quickly regain the weight lost after the surgery.

The advantages, however, lie in the fact that surgery usually tends to induce healthier weight loss, which preserves lean mass, while drugs cause weight loss due largely to the loss of muscle tissue.

The study

It is to mimic these benefits that researchers from the American company have developed their therapy, designed to block the absorption of nutrients in the duodenum for 24 hours, so that it can be taken as a daily treatment that can be suspended at any time without contraindications. Since it is an experimental drug, it is currently being tested in a phase 1 clinical study, which must first verify its safety and tolerability for patients.

So far, the drug has been tested on nine patients, without any side effects emerging. The drug has been shown to work as expected in the intestine, and to be eliminated in the expected time by the body. In the 10 days of follow-up, participants also showed levels of leptin and ghrelin in the blood in line with a significant reduction in calorie intake. In preclinical trials on animal models, the drug also produced a loss of 1% of body mass per week, preserving 100% of lean muscle mass. It is therefore an extremely promising anti-obesity therapy, which will have to confirm the results in larger clinical studies before being used alongside new anti-obesity therapies in clinical practice.